position.  When we remember that Europe, which lies before us on the map as a continent, was once an archipelago of islands,—­that, where the Pyrenees raise their rocky barrier between France and Spain, the waters of the Mediterranean and Atlantic met,—­that, where the British Channel flows, dry land united England and France, and Nature in those days made one country of the lands parted since by enmities deeper than the waters that run between,—­when we remember, in short, all the fearful convulsions that have torn asunder the surface of the earth, as if her rocky record had indeed been written on paper, we shall find a new evidence of the intellectual unity which holds together the whole physical history of the globe in the fact that through all the storms of time the investigator is able to trace one unbroken thread of thought from the beginning to the present hour.

The tree is known by its fruits,—­and the fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, unreasoning force.  A coherence that binds all the geological ages in one chain, a stability of purpose that completes in the beings born to-day an intention expressed in the first creatures that swam in the Silurian ocean or crept upon its shores, a steadfastness of thought, practically recognized by man, if not acknowledged by him, whenever he traces the intelligent connection between the facts of Nature and combines them into what he is pleased to call his system of Geology, or Zoology, or Botany,—­these things are not the fruits of chance or of an unreasoning force, but the legitimate results of intellectual power.  There is a singular lack of logic, as it seems to me, in the views of the materialistic naturalists.  While they consider classification, or, in other words, their expression of the relations between animals or between physical facts of any kind, as the work of their intelligence, they believe the relations themselves to be the work of physical causes.  The more direct inference surely is, that, if it requires an intelligent mind to recognize them, it must have required an intelligent mind to establish them.  These relations existed before man was created; they have existed ever since the beginning of time; hence, what we call the classification of facts is not the work of his mind in any direct original sense, but the recognition of an intelligent action prior to his own existence.

There is, perhaps, no part of the world, certainly none familiar to science, where the early geological periods can be studied with so much ease and precision as in the United States.  Along their northern borders, between Canada and the United States, there runs the low line of hills known as the Laurentian Hills.  Insignificant in height, nowhere rising more than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet above the level of the sea, these are nevertheless the first mountains that broke the uniform level of the earth’s surface and lifted themselves above the waters.